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DARPA Awards HPC Contracts To IBM, Cray, Not Sun

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the no-soup-for-you dept.

snedecor writes "DARPA has awarded a third round of funding for the next-generation petascale computing system. IBM and Cray roughly split the $494M, while Sun, with little track record, received none. This is in spite of Sun's radical proposal for proximity communication."

5 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. UCAN by Stanistani · · Score: 4, Funny

    You can pet a dog, you can pet a cat, but you can't petascale.

    --
    You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
  2. Loosing may be a good thing by renau · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The HPCA program is a "cover" (not so cover) funding to companies. The problem is that it is not so clear that it is even good for them. The reason is that "lots" of additional resources from these companies are also diverted for these projects. Since these machines have a "doubtful" application besides the DARPA contract, I think that it may be better for these companies to invest on research more related to their product or may-be products.

    For example, Sun Labs was in charge of the DARPA project at Sun. They have "invested" 3 years on that. My question is "what do they have to show?".
    They do not have publications on any top computer architecture conference, they do not seem to have anything that may save Sun ass. (At least from
    an architecture point of view)

    This is not such a strange comment, I have head it from people at IBM research itself. Some people there is not sure that winning is the best thing either.

    1. Re:Loosing may be a good thing by lowoddnumber · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Working at Sun I've heard the higher-ups discuss these grants and awards and from what I gather, despite the award money, it is still very expensive for the company. The award money is not enough to fund a competitive entry. IBM definitely has a lot more money to put into the effort than Sun does. Not defending them though. It's a bummer for the company that they didn't get the grant, but I probably agree that losing could be a good thing. Winning would be great for bragging rights and image.

      I really don't know anything.

  3. Re:more likely... by georgewilliamherbert · · Score: 3, Informative

    Niagra and Niagra 2 have lousy floating point performance (1 FPU for entire chip, shared by all the cores). Given that the DARPA project is for FLOPS, Nigra is just about the worst processor one could propose for the project.

    I love the Niagra design; for 90% of what I need done, it does great. It's just terrible at floating point.

    Sometime down the line, past Niagra 2, one could posit a version of such a chip with enough floating point units that it's efficient in FLOPS; it's an obvious upgrade of the current chips. However, that also is not optimal for FLOPS in the HPC regime. HPC is all about hiring enough computer scientists and physicists to micro-optimize the code so that you make close to theoretical maximum efficiency in utilizing the CPU cores. Niagra is all about keeping enough contexts on the chip that you can productively use the time that normal programs spend wasted, waiting for main memory accesses and so on. HPC by definition spends the CS time and effort to avoid that already.

  4. Re:Where was HP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    HP couldn't figure out how to sell printer ink for a supercomputer. Thus, they have no way of making any money on it.